Is it ok to just sell the original AutoCad manuals on Ebay or does Autocad also own those too?
There is a very old accepted standard on copyright with respect to books that Autodesk can't get around. Software is a newer field with a good amount of play in copyright laws that allows software companies to get away with murder. Basically because you can install the software and give away the disks without losing the benefit of the software since it is so hard to verify that the software is really removed. What some companies do now when selling computer books is include a disk that pushes the book over to being software, even though the real value is the book and not the disk, and therefore not subject to standard book copyright rules, but in the realm of software copyright/patent law.
Autocad has basically no rights to say much about reselling a book that comes from an outside source. They can sue the original author and publisher if they feel it is libelous or if it contains privileged/secret info that they don't want disclosed, but once they have given it their seal of approval for publication (by not raising legal objections when first published,) they have little say in how it is sold or resold. While EBay may not complain, I think it is due to the fact that the books being sold are classified by them as books and not software, and so they do very little about verification, even if they could be on the line about that borderline interpretation as software. To some extent publishing houses are in the same boat as EBay, since even though the inclusion of software gives them some additional rights, their legal teams don't look for violations of those rights since they are ingrained to think of their works as solely being books and may not be willing to invest the manpower to investigate/search for violations. Also they are a little afraid of having it come to court and getting an adverse decision (Is the primary value the book or the disk? Does the book stand alone without the disk? etc.) Plus in many cases they aren't supplying commercial software, but data files to be used as examples, freeware, sampleware, and/or shareware which they don't even own anyways. My son, in college, took several courses where the textbook included a disk, where the disk was little more than a powerpoint presentation of the key points in the book and some sample quizzes. Is this subject to software rights or limited to book rights? Can he legally resell this textbook? All I know is that he did, not whether he was infringing on some copyright, and of course the publisher never investigated or even found out about it.
